THE WILLS WILDLIFE SANCTUARY: MY UPCOMING TONY SOPRANO MOMENT

Frani and I's favorite Sopranos moment is an early one.  When the ducks leave Tony's pool, and he begins to have debilitating panic attacks.  The way James Gandolfini performs a character so vicious and yet deserving of a smidgen of sympathy is a gift the man had that many don't.  God rest him. 

A couple of weeks ago as Frani and I were going through the nightly constitutional of taking the dogs out, something stunned us both.  For a couple of consecutive nights, we surprised a mourning dove, who could be heard chirping and fluttering up against the ceiling of the patio in a panic of sorts. I felt guilty both times, but was wondering what in the hell he/she was doing there well after dark. 

The answer came days later.  While I was at work, Frani sent me a text that made me smile.  In the upside-down guard of a weed-whacker resting against the wall of the patio, right outside Cameron's window, was a nesting mourning dove.  A few days later, another text came, this time Frani updating me that babies (or squabs) were peeking out from under the adult dove.  They weren't just building the nest, they were brooding. 

Bursts of research showed that the doves pick spots like this intentionally.  The ceiling of the patio provides excellent cover from assholes like Blue Jays. It's wonderful in its ability to provide shelter from inclement weather, which Texas occasionally has in the spring.  And human activity keeps away multiple types of predators. 

We learned a few other things.  How often they feed.  How long the parents will stay, leave, and return.  How quickly they will grow.  We've become invested in these little guys, and hope that they do well. The parents have left them overnight twice as of this point, still returning to feed them.  When we go out with the canines we can hear their alternating calls, which are probably alerts for the young, since they are almost the size of their parents at this point. 

Sadly, they will be leaving soon.  We've seen one jump to a neighboring shelf only to return when the parent came back.   It won't be long before they legitimately leave, and according to what I've read, it's a one-way trip, in which the male takes over for a couple weeks teaching his kiddos to forage, seek shelter, and fly. 

I just hope I don't turn into Tony Soprano when they do depart without return and have an aviary psychotic break. 

Here's a video that I made in honor of this wonderful little injection of hardwired yet feathered and gorgeous nature into our lives. 

MOVIES I STAYED UP LATE FOR: THE SAVAGE FIVE

My first exposure to The Savage Five was during a late 1981 WGN TV theme week of martial arts films. I believe The Seven Deadly Venoms and The 36 Chambers of Shaolin were also included in this batch. As I recall, the Friday night flick of this particular week was the film I’m writing about right now. 

 In Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, the plot line was driven by the anticipation of oncoming bandits, the preparation of the fearful villagers and recruitment of help to defeat them.  In The Savage Five the bandits are already there and doing damage from nearly the get-go. 

The Bandits attack this pacifist enclave, abusing everyone, robbing the businesses, committing murder, and eliciting sacrifices that are heartbreaking and unspeakable.  One of them displayed in an absolutely wrenching scene that is completely unlike the typical kung-fu flick victim faire; it's emotional and raw.

I grew up watching martial arts films on "Blackbelt Theatre" and the like as a kid. The frequency bred familiarity.  In this particular film,  I was moved by the far more plot-driven feel than the contemporaries I’d encountered.  However, the awful dubbing makes it very difficult to gauge the quality of the performances.  
I really don’t believe a lead villain was saying shit like: “Hey let’s take a look at what’s going on outside!”,  Just as a villager is helping an abused rebel down from a tree the villains had hung him from.


The facial expressions and expressive emoting during the dialogue however are easy to buy. 
John Woo’s future number 2 and 3, Ti Lung, and Danny Lee, respectively, and Kung Fu legend David Chiang lead a great cast guided by the master Cheng Cheh.  Beautifully shot, and wonderfully choreographed, but still minimalist, The Savage Five is arguably among the most grounded of the Shaw Brothers output, as its realistic narrative takes steps their more aspirational flicks never had the guts to take.

Out of all the Kung Fu movies of the 70's that blew up in the wake of Bruce Lee's Asian martial arts film explosion, Five is not among the highly regarded.  But for me, outside of Lee's oeuvre, it may be the strongest.  My memories of that early 1980's Lichter Road living room screening, which prompted my own side-kicking and air-punching along with Ti, David and Danny, are still strong to this day.  I'm sure my chop-socky aura is still floating in the air of that Southern Wisconsin living room.

MY TEACHERS: A HARD ONE TO FIGURE

Seventh grade was hard.  I felt like I was wandering onto another planet.  The first few days memories still have a tug on the gut.  I can remember nausea rumbling while hearing Taco's Puttin' on the Ritz on the radio in the morning waiting to leave for the city bus.  

Not only would I know absolutely no one as I traversed from elementary school to Junior High because of a district switch, I had to ride to school with very few kids my age, but a lot of adult strangers.   Many who talked to themselves.  Many elderly.  

Many crying babies.

It was all so intimidating.  A nice windy additive to the cyclone my life had been since Dad got sick.  The teachers were also a series of anomalies.  Particularly Mr. Malone. 

Dude was hard to figure.  He taught Social Studies, and he did know his shit.  But he was odd.  He'd go into these internal monologues when angered by a student's chatter, outright rudeness, or lack of classy behavior.  Mr. Malone would stare you down.  He would develop an evil, guttural chuckle and bitterly sarcastic grin as he dressed you down.  He'd narrow his eyelids and begin muttering to himself about failed psychologies; "I'm okay, you're okay...."   Flat out irritated by the immaturity of his 12 and 13 year old Social Studies students.  Us Current Events aspriationals. 

One day, because there was a little too much effort behind a yawn,  that ire was directed at me.  I got that treatment I had seen so many times before.  I was embarrassed.  I was downtrodden, and didn't want to destroy my school year.  This other outside shit, the strangers, the buses, the inner city school student body, often gang members (sometimes stoned) that I wasn't used to being around. 

The mocking.  The bullying.  The instantaneous violence. 

All that shit was too much already.  I didn't want to condemn my academics.  

This end I could control. 

So I went to visit Mr. Malone after class to apologize for the yawn. We spoke for a little while, talked it out a little.  He made it seem like we were good.  Then he said something to me, without a true facial expression, without a smile.

"You seem different from the rest."

That felt weird.  But I felt like I had accomplished what I needed to do.  Later in the year, when end of the day "clubs and groups" were formed, I joined Mr. Malone's hiking club.  Basically we walked as a group down to Lake Michigan and back.  As summer's frothy head deflated down to fall, it transformed into The Chicago Cubs Club, which corresponded to the Cubbies 1984 run at the playoffs.  Somewhere the North Shore boys hadn't been in decades.  The Cubs were better than hiking, an activity that gave Tom Murphy the opportunity to turn around, and just before hawking a monster loogie at me, chortle out "Dance, Buddy".

Fuckin' nonce.

We gathered viewing materials, Mr. Malone rolled in a TV set and we watched the Cubbies run at it.  My Dad was a big newspaper reader, and every Saturday Morning during this exciting season I would run with a quarter to the row of newspaper machines in the covered walkway of the plaza across the alley from our house.  That quarter gave me a Chicago Sun-Times and a fresh full page color poster of one of the Wrigley Field Warriors starting players. 

Mr. Malone used my newsprint substrate mini-posters to help create a display in one of those glass encased hallway windows for our club. I was pretty proud to make such a major contribution to it. I didn't get along with the kids in the club at all, most of them were a clique of diques, but Malone?  Thanks to that Mr. Malone guy, despite how most of the 7th grade felt about him, despite how angry and strange he could be, Malone was all right.  He had valid reasons to feel the way he did, teaching was turning a corner into not just being difficult at this point.  

Mr. Malone was spittin' jewels at us. Pearls before swine. He knew his stuff, was well versed on 200 plus years of American History, from the Constitution to the Falkland Islands crisis blasting at us from Roger Mudd every night.  No one respected that nearly enough. 

 I could deal with the other kids thanks to all of that.  

I never did get my mini-posters back.  Never was able to hang Rick Sutcliffe, Bob Dernier, Gary "Sarge" Matthews, or Ryne Sandberg on my bedroom walls. 

But, as far as the Cub Club kids, I know that I was different from the rest of them.  Because Mr. Malone said so.

And I still am. 

HERE IS MR. MALONE'S OBITUARY.

ADDENDUM:  In the winter of 1984, Mr. Malone assigned us a brief essay on something out of the days news.  I picked the budding negative controversy surrounding the horror film, Silent Night, Deadly Night and its depiction of a murderous Santa Claus.  I even attached a newspaper theatre ad from the same day's paper to highlight my eloquent observations about the silliness of the whole thing. 

Mr. Malone, I have since learned, was a conservative.  I got an A anyway.  That's who he was. 

SALEM'S LOT UPDATE

 Well, the video goes into more detail, but finally a SPECIAL EDITION of Salem's Lot is released, and just a hair shy of 50 years after it aired.  Ridiculous. 

But here we go...

I'm a little more photogenic than Barlow, but I didn't feel like typing all that shit.

YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME

 I’ve gotten pissed off recently at the DVD and Blu-Ray industry.  Particularly the boutique industry, so to speak. And I’ll give you a couple examples of reasons why:

Number one:

Enemy Territory. This is a movie that has great sentimental value for me due to the fact that in 1987, I rented it from the Schofield, WI Super 29 grocery store's video section.  On a Saturday night I watched it with my mom. It was a low budget action picture that never even made the jump from VHS to DVD.  Hell, at the time I rented it, I'd never even heard of it. It may not have even seen a theatrical release. Finally Arrow, a company which I have been actually starting to think may surpass Scream Factory in quality and film selection, decides to release it this next year.  

But only in the fucking UK. That’s ridiculous. This is the most quintessentially American 80s film that I can even think of off the top of my head and it’s only being released in the UK?  It stars Ray Parker Jr. as a maintenance mechanic trapped along with Gary Frank in a gang-infested high rise project.  This unlikely duo must fight their way out.  My Ma and I enjoyed the hell out of this little CBS/Fox VHS release, and it has great sentimental value as Mom explained to me the cinematic history of Frank, and also Jan-Michael Vincent, another star of the film.  Tony Todd makes an early appearance here as a frighteningly intimidating leader of the film's gang, the Vampires.  So being released in the UK alone makes no sense to me.

Ditto is the case with Brian DePalma’s The Fury.  It did see a DVD release I once encountered at a Shopko in Southeast Wisconsin, and a limited release through Twilight Time's Blu-Ray label.  Both are bare bones however.  I only own the laser disc you see pictured up at the top.  I'm hoping the Arrow folks will eventually push it out over here, or someone else will license the title for American release. 

Example Number Two: 

Outland. Now this is a film. I’m gonna write further about it in a future Spectrum Files entry. In short, it’s an action sci-fi film that is essentially a retelling of High Noon starring Sean Connery, and taking place on one of the moons of Jupiter.  A stellar film directed by Peter Hyams that I won’t go into any more detail with because I selfishly want you to read the other piece. The great thing about it; however, Arrow is releasing a deluxe, special edition with tons of bonus features on it that go above and beyond what I would expect for this film. 

The negative: It’s only on 4K. 

Salem’s Lot time.  I’m sure that if you’ve read this blog, you’re probably tired of hearing about it. Here’s a link to further information on it from me so I don’t have to irritate you by repeating myself: LINK.  The film was released to TV in 1979 which was well over 40 years ago. Finally,  Arrow is coming out with a super deluxe special edition of the mini-series. The special edition I’ve been waiting for forever. 

The problem is: Once again only on 4K. 

Now I did a slight amount of research and found out that the reason that Arrow is doing this is because they and other boutique physical media companies think cinephiles and physical media collectors are in the game for 4K and have left Blu-Ray in the wind.  If it's true that this is their belief, it pisses me off. 

Because it is a bunch of shite.

I’m a collector, but I’ve done most of my film collecting by hunting for the cheapest possible pick up I can find by visiting clearance racks,  Entertainmarts,  Movie Trading Companies, and the cut out bins of Half-Price Books. By going on eBay and trying to hustle the lowest price out of whoever is selling the films. I'm not cheap.  I'm frugal and not wealthy.  I’m also not going to pay $500 for a top-of-the-line 4K player. I can’t afford it. And I’m not the only collector of physical media that feels that anger.  

I mean, Just sitting there and thinking that true fans of film and those that have a collection of hard copies should be 4K owners is really shortsighted. It’s not gonna kill these companies to put a Blu-ray of their 4K upgraded movie out there for those of us who don’t have the 4K player.

It’s kind of insulting, and a little bit elitist, to think that those who collect physical media are only into the high end reproduction, and the rest of us are a bunch of half-wit art and tech-retarded inbreds.  Mind you, these boutique companies do wonderful work: bringing quasi-lost films back from the scrap heap, video and audio remastering, newly filmed documentarian looks back,  archival material that they research and gather, and right on down to the packaging.  Why, they're fucking artists, really.  

Then why cut those nerds among us that can't do the 4k thing, completely out of the running to own these films that have returned from the format grave?  The nerds that buttered your bread as you boutique monsters grew your businesses??

You all can kiss my ass, if that's how you're gonna roll, and suck on a chili dog out behind the tasty freeze. .

.

Up at aunt Mae’s

As evidenced by this post here: Those Quiet Moments, I spent some time in Beaver Dam with my dads family. My parents didn’t always bring me up there alone, often going  up there  with siblings. 

I can recall seeing my brother Dan’s red glowing cigarette ember floating in the dark across my Grandma’s living room. I don’t know how well that ended for Dan but it’s one of my earliest memories. But that was at my grandmother‘s house. 

Aunt Mae’s was a different experience. In one of Mae’s spare rooms, My sister Pee Wee and I would sometimes play “The floor is lava” while using the cushions from the “radio bed” as I liked to call it, as flotation devices.  I slept in that room, and I can remember lying in the dark, the only light being from the radio dial and a backlit photograph of Mount Saint Helens that my father had bought for my aunt years before  (I actually still own that picture). The only sound was “Heartache Tonight ” from the radio’s hidden speakers. 

I once owned that piece of furniture too, and it is One of my regrets that I no longer do. 

Anyway, we used the cushions from the stiff  plaid sofa portions of that unit to keep from being consumed to our fiery deaths by the pretend magma beneath us.

I’d often run around in the basement to occupy my time. I was bored after all;  I remember seeing some Bob Hope humor magazines underneath the mattress lid of the footrest ottoman that had been in the basement. 

I didn’t get the jokes.  Especially the cartoon of a bride, asking from the seat next to her groom at a wedding reception for pickles and ice cream.

There was a mini sauna there as well.  It looked like a plastic medieval torture device.  The basement was also adorned by an unfinished bathroom. Unfinished in 1979, and it remained unfinished in the mid 2000s.

My aunt Mae was the owner of the first cable box I ever saw. It was in her living room that I first saw The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and The Beguiled. (a film which haunts me to this day).  I watched these films later than I should’ve, up on a Saturday evening, as my parents, my aunt Mae and uncle Roger played cards in the kitchen. I can still hear the clinking of glasses, the muffled laughter over whiskey sours and brandy old fashioneds, and the fog of cigarettes. The buzz and crackle from the television that was on a cart in that dining room area, where I first saw the static-hidden teaser trailer for Ridley Scott’s Alien.  

This was a place they entertained themselves so many times over the years. 

There was also a Ben Cooper Wolfman jiggler that I played with often when I was there. Back in 1979, which I think was the last time I was there as a child,  I remember hanging the Wolfman by the little string that was affixed to his back from a peg in the basement pole.  Back in the mid 2000s, when aunt Mae had me over for the first time in many years, I went down into that basement because my uncle Roger wanted to show me something. 

Standing in the glow coming through the basement windows, taken in by the dust floating through the air, wondering if the particles had been there when I was a kid,  I saw something else that definitely had been there in my youth. 

Hanging from the pole was the Wolfman. 

Now, a sibling’s history says that I had a nephew that apparently played with that Wolfman as well,  however he had the decency to always hang it back where I had left it some 20+ years before. I kind of got a chill down my spine when I saw it there. It was almost like that entire basement had been frozen in time. 

I guess in some ways,  it was. 

Technology and Shit

As you can see with this:  TECH, I have a fascination with old technology.  Especially if it is still working and being used successfully.  Now, if you read the link that I have there, you know that I'm obsessed with the media end of it, and maybe the computer end...

The more I think of it, the more it goes from being a mere interest, to being a question of our own humanity in a way. 

Right now Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, are still heading out toward the heliosphere.  They were both launched in 1977.  They're still fucking chugging along. They are powered by plutonium rods (I think), which means they must have small reactors inside them of a sort, hence 50 years of power.  But get this: the information they store is kept on digital 8 track tapes that continually overwrite as necessary.  

They're still sending information back, through radio waves.  The signal is weak because it is traveling across 15 billion miles of space.  That's right, 15 billion!!  So NASA set up antennas that are so strong that they can make sense of those incredibly weak radio transmissions.  Transmissions that take some 22 hours to reach their destinations. 

Here's where it really spins my skull.  In 2024 there was a breakdown with Voyager 1.  It was sending back garbage information.  So they fixed 47 year old technology from 15 billion miles away.  I can't make hide nor hair of what's going on with their McGuyvering, so check this shit out:  NASA

They basically rewrote the code somehow with whatever 1977 computer technology is on that thing using programming here on Earth from the now.  From 15 billion miles away.  

I can't comprehend how smart these people are... I'm lucky if I can tie my shoes. 

But look, man.  Human Americans can reprogram a 50 year old probe that's 15 billion miles from Earth, but we can't figure out how to make a refrigerator, washer/dryer or dishwasher give us 15 solid years without a problem?

These hunks of space program metal are headed toward interstellar space in absolutely frigid temperatures using technology of power, propulsion, computer memory, signal broadcast, instrumentation, heating and who knows what else that were top of the line during the Summer of Sam.  When Ron Guidry was pitching for the Yankees.  When Jimmy Carter was president.  Star Wars was number one at the box office, and Fleetwood Mac's Rumors was the top selling album.  VCRs cost $5,000.00 in todays dollars.

The Voyager twins are continuously sending back information on plasma waves, magnetic fields, cosmic rays, particles, and its own engineering health.  From 15 billion miles away. 

Here on Earth we can't talk to each other and our gubmint has decided just this week to bail on the EPA energy law that was turning the corner on ozone layer depletion, car emissions and power plant releases.  Why?

They felt like we needed to use "beautiful, clean coal" (a fucking oxymoron if there ever was one) more than we were cuz money.  That whole wind, sun, energy thing.... just too much work.  We need to fuck the planet up for our kid's kids because money. 

So we're still learning about what's going on 15 billion miles away in the depths of areas that Ripley and the Nostromo were navigating in Alien (a film only a year younger than the Voyager Twins) while we fuck up our own corner of the Solar System. 

Nice.